Roger Waters Working on Opera Based on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

Pink Floyd's 1979 double-album The Wall is already a celebrated rock opera, but now Roger Waters is removing the "rock" part of the equation. The creative force behind The Wall is currently involved in turning it into an actual opera.

As France 24 reports, Waters has joined forces with the Opera de Montreal to create Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera in conjunction with the 375th birthday celebration for the city. Waters is creating the libretto for the the production, which is scheduled to open in March 2017, and Julien Bilodeau is adapting the score. Etienne Dupuis is slated to star as Pink. You can hear an excerpt from it above.

Waters admitted he was skeptical about embarking on the project, but then he was sent the music. "It had been my experience that experiments in collaboration between the worlds of rock and roll and the worlds of symphonic music were generally disastrous and should be embarked upon with extreme trepidation," he said. "But they were extremely persuasive [...] I sat there not expecting to be moved, and I was moved. Very moved. So I approach this project with great enthusiasm."

Montreal has a connection to the creation of The Wall. While performing at the city's Olympic Stadium in support of 1977's Animals, the behavior of a fan caused Waters to spit in his face. The incident caused him to create an imaginary wall between himself and the audience every night to get through the performance. As he began to work on the band's next album, he thought about how traumatic events from his childhood -- his father's death, his education -- had all led up to his action that night.

Waters is also working on a new album that continues on his themes of being against violence. “[T]he basic question of the album is, ‘Why are we killing the children?'” he said in November 2015. He is hoping that the live show for the project will seamlessly blend his older material with the new songs to help reinforce that motion.